Saturday, September 26, 2015

Fallen Icons: Big Brother, formerly Grim Justice

SYSTEM: ICONS

One of the products I very much like is the
Iconic Legends series from Rogue Genius Games, which are ICONS versions of
various comic characters with new names and backstories. (Jacob Blackmon and
Mike Lafferty do the writing and co-creation.) It's an excellent series.

Anyway, to me, it seems that the biggest
problem is that the characters in the series might overshadow the PCs.
(Whether they do or not depends on your campaign or whether these characters
are being played.) My proposed way to handle this is Fallen Icons:
characters who cannot fight crime any more, but who obviously were closely
modeled on existing characters. A second note talks about what needs to be
changed to make them characters in their prime (or if those are extensive, a
whole second character—it's ICONS; that won't be huge).

For whatever reason, all of the characters that RGG has released so far
have Marvel characters are their inspirations; to avoid stepping on toes,
I'll do DC characters. Here's one.

Big Brother

Grim Justice (Spencer Fade) was one of the great trained heroes the world
had seen, but even with the incredible good luck that some heroes have, a
trained hero has a limited shelf life. Eventually, an augmented individual
named Blight was as smart as he was, and stronger. After some years of crime
fighting, Spencer Fade escaped with a broken back, paralyzed from the hips
down.

After a long and ultimately fruitless
search for a cure, he switched tactics. He became Big Brother, the all-seeing
information broker and aid to heroes everywhere.

One of his
temporary solutions has been built into his wheelchair. The powered
exoskeleton which he hoped would replace his legs has been built into his
chair. Should an old enemy discover his identity, the chair unfolds legs and
has enough power to let him function briefly, usually enough time to
get away. There are also some weapons built into the chair so he can protect the bystanders who are there. He may have to
succumb to his enemies—the Grimace, Blight, Quizzical, Bubastis, and
others—but he doesn't plan to make it easy.

Instead of the Big Brother quality, he had "Billionaire playboy and philanthropist"

Notes

The original comics character is hard to convert: over his decades-long history he's been everything from grim avenger in the night to jolly costumed cop. So I picked and chose. You might have a separate interpretation, and it's perfectly valid.